First Things First -Essays on the Buddhist Path was published in 2018 by the Metta Forest Monastery and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported. The essays were collected from various sources and are the seventh collection of essays by the Buddhist monk Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu.
The essays included in this book are: Honest to Goodness, Did the Buddha Teach Free Will?, In the Eyes of the Wise, First Things First, The Karma of Now, The Streams of Emotions, Worlds & Their Cessation, Wisdom over Justice, All Winners, No Losers, How Pointy is One-pointedness?, The Limits of Description, and The Names for Nirvana. From the book:
Clean up our own act
One of the most distinctive features of the Dhamma is that it points to the source of suffering inside. In other words, we suffer because of our own actions, and we’ll be able to end suffering only when we can change the way we act. To be willing to take on such a teaching—rather than one that blames our suffering on things or people outside, or that promises that someone outside can end our suffering for us—we need at least a glimmer of two qualities of the character. We have to be (1) observant enough and (2) honest enough to admit that, yes, we do suffer from our own actions, and that we’ll have to clean up our own act if we want the suffering to stop.
Download First Things First here (107 pages/1.7 MB):
Thank you so much indeed.